WASHINGTON - Immigration-reform advocates and opponents are turning their attention to the House of Representatives after Senate passage of a landmark immigration-reform bill to boost border security and provide a pathway to citizenship for many of the estimated 11million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

The Senate passed the historic 1,200-plus-page bill on Thursday by a vote of 68-32.

Fourteen Republican senators joined all 52 Democrats and two independents to pass the bill, which was crafted by a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators that included Arizona Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake.

The far-reaching legislation is the first comprehensive immigration-reform bill to clear the Senate since 2006. That year, the bill died in the House, which reform supporters fear poses a similarly steep challenge this year.

“The Senate’s passage of a major immigration-reform bill is a milestone, but it is only half the battle,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration expert and law professor at Cornell University Law School. “A tougher battle lies ahead in the House.”

Speaker John Boehner vowed that the House will take up its own legislation rather than vote on the bipartisan Senate bill.

“The House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said before Thursday’s vote. “We’re going to do our own bill, through regular order, and it’ll be legislation that reflects the will of our (Republican) majority and the will of the American people.”

Boehner plans to meet with House Republicans on July10 to discuss how to proceed.

House leaders have so far favored a much narrower, piecemeal approach to reform that does not include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which is the top Democratic priority.

After the vote, McCain, the top GOP negotiator in the Senate group that wrote the bill, warned that the worst thing Senate reform supporters can do is be “disrespectful” toward the House and its agenda. He predicted the proposed pathway to citizenship will remain the primary point of contention.

“We can’t bully the House. We can’t force them,” McCain told The Arizona Republic. “But what we can do is do everything we can to make sure that they understand that we’d like to negotiate with them and we’d like for them to act. But we’re also going to have to have the strong support of the business community, the Catholic Church, the evangelicals — all of this very large coalition that has been assembled behind this legislation. That’s really the key to it.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., McCain’s Democratic counterpart in the Gang of Eight, predicted that the House will not be able to ignore the strong bipartisan support the bill received in the Senate.

“I believe that support will propel it through the House and to the president’s desk for his signature by the end of this year,” Schumer said.

Backers had repeatedly expressed hopes of passing the bill with 70 votes, but it fell two short of that goal. After the vote, some critics called the final tally a disappointment.

“Sixty-eight is a very strong number, and we did get a significant number of Republicans,” McCain said. “We will be judged whether we ever get a bill to the president’s desk or not. Not whether it was 68 or 70 or 65.”

Senators who supported the bill hope that the bulk of their legislation will survive after House and Senate negotiators meet to reconcile their versions of reform, assuming that the House passes a bill.

But Boehner, who is struggling to hold together his fractured Republican caucus, warned that he will not bring any bill to the House floor that cannot win the support of a majority of Republicans. He said he would not allow a bill — even a conference agreement — to pass with a minority of Republicans joining with a majority of Democrats.

“For any legislation — including a conference report — to pass the House, it’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of a majority of our (Republican) members,” Boehner said.

Flake, who served 12 years in the House before joining the Senate this year, called Boehner’s hard-line position “unfortunate.” Flake had been hoping that Boehner, who some have viewed as a potential ally on immigration reform, would not block any final compromise that emerged from House-Senate negotiations simply because a majority of House Republicans didn’t like it.

“I hope it was a misprint,” Flake told The Republic.

However, House conservatives have made it increasingly clear to Boehner that he could risk an insurrection should he try to circumvent the GOP caucus.

Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., this week became the second House Republican to send a public warning to Boehner, telling the Wall Street Journal that relying on Democrats to ram through an immigration-reform bill opposed by most in the House GOP “could be the proverbial straw that would break the camel’s back.”

Still, immigrant-reform advocates said they hope Boehner and other House leaders will be inspired by the Senate vote.

“House leaders must come together in the same bipartisan spirit that defined the Senate debate,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.

President Barack Obama, an immigration-reform supporter who publicly kept his distance from the Senate deliberations, also called on the House to do its job, while telling immigration-reform supporters to stay vigilant.

“As this process moves forward, I urge everyone who cares about this issue to keep a watchful eye,” Obama said in a written statement. “Now is the time when opponents will try their hardest to pull this bipartisan effort apart so they can stop common-sense reform from becoming a reality. We cannot let that happen.”

Organizing for Action, a liberal group that supported the Senate bill, is already organizing grass-roots events throughout the country to push House members to pass comprehensive reform.

“The Senate vote was a great step forward,” group leaders said in a written statement. “Now, it’s time to take the fight to the House.”

Opponents of the Senate reform bill plan to do the same.

“We fully expect that this betrayal of the American public will be dead on arrival in the House,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Thankfully, the House has made it clear that true immigration reform must protect the interests of the American people.

“FAIR expects to work with members of the House to ensure that legislation coming out of that body provides a workable plan to secure our borders, enforce immigration laws in the interior of the country, and protect American jobs and tax dollars.”

One expert on Congress said supporters may find it tough to persuade House Republicans to go along with Senate-style reform. Many represent conservative districts, and they all face re-election next year, unlike some Senate supporters such as Flake, who won’t face voters again until 2018.

“The Framers designed the two chambers to respond to different kinds of pressure, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here,” said John J. “Jack” Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. “A two-thirds vote in the Senate isn’t necessarily going to carry any weight in the House. Because if you’re a House member, your constituency consists of the people back home and not the guys on the other side of the Hill.”

For the Senate, Thursday’s vote represented a rare bipartisan effort to solve one of the nation’s most vexing problems. The last major immigration bill considered by the Senate was rejected by senators in 2007. Congress has not passed such a sweeping immigration overhaul since 1986.

“We cussed one another, we cheered one another, and we produced a bill,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Gang of Eight, said of the negotiations and compromises that led to passage of the legislation.

“I’m not going to miss those hours-long meetings every day,” McCain said jokingly.

The bill began in February with closed-door negotiations by the eight senators, who unveiled their plan in April. The Senate Judiciary Committee then held public hearings, followed by a long amendment process in May.

During the three-week debate on the Senate floor, support for the bill appeared to waver as critics attacked it as weak on border security.

But the legislation regained momentum late last week when a bipartisan agreement was reached on an aggressive, $38billion border-security amendment.

That amendment, which was added to the overall bill, would double the number of border-security agents to about 40,000, complete 350miles of fence along the southwestern border and invest in drones, radar and other surveillance equipment to detect illegal border crossings.

“This bill secures the border, and anyone who says it doesn’t does not understand our security needs,” McCain said.

But senators who opposed the bill said it does not go far enough in ensuring that the border-security measures are in place and working before granting legal status to undocumented immigrants.

“We screwed up in 1986 by not securing the border first,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. “We’re right back here again. ... This bill won’t ensure that a future Congress isn’t back here in 25years dealing with the very same problems.”

Posting a comment to our website allows you to join in on the conversation. Share your story and unique perspective with members of the azcentral.com community.

Comments posted via facebook:

► Join the Discussion

Join the conversation! To comment on azcentral.com, you must be logged into an active personal account on Facebook. You are responsible for your comments and abuse of this privilege will not be tolerated. We reserve the right, without warning or notification, to remove comments and block users judged to violate our Terms of Service and Rules of Engagement. Facebook comments FAQ

Join thousands of azcentral.com fans on Facebook and get the day's most popular and talked-about Valley news, sports, entertainment and more - right in your newsfeed. You'll see what others are saying about the hot topics of the day.